World of Warships 0.6.6 Public Test
5 min readHello everyone,
Public Test will be running from 25 May at 18:30 CEST until 29 May at 15:00 CEST (UTC+2).
Patch Notes
Scenarios & PvE Operations
Initially, Cooperative battles were introduced mostly for the training purpose or for a sake of upgrading ships from stock to top, but they were never considered as a full-featured game mode. However, we saw that many players found their joy in fights against bots. The great majority of positive comments regarding Halloween mode made us sure that a new game mode would be in demand – the one, where players are not just fighting till all enemies are defeated or till victory by points, but feel themselves real participants of a naval operation. That is why we are luckily introducing you a new mode called “Operations”. Besides it, we plan to develop a battle type “Scenarios”, completing it with new modes.
That said, we’re introducing a new battle type Scenario to the game. With the release of update 0.6.6, four different operations will be available that you can have a go at during the Public Test.
In the Operations PvE mode, seven players cooperate against AI enemies in various scenarios. Take this opportunity to participate in interesting and eventful battles to earn new achievements and valuable rewards. In version 0.6.6, Operations will be available for players with Service Record starting from level 8 and with ships of Tiers V and VI.
Initially after the Update’s implementation, only one operation will be available. Other operations will be unlocked in succession (you can see the date when the operation will become available displayed over the locked operation) and be featured as the “Operation of the week” until the next operation is unlocked. Operations that have already been unlocked can be played, but only within an extended division that includes at least 4 players. For testing purposes, we will rotate “Operation of the week” every hour in the Public Test.
Each operation has a set of main tasks and several optional tasks. Complete all of them in one run and earn the biggest reward! You can test your skills alone or create an unique extended divisions with up to seven other teammates; available only in this mode!
Specifically for the Operations mode, we added new maps, ships, destructible ground facilities, battle interface elements and even a repair ship! Join in to be among the first to try out the new features and changes!
The release of Scenarios will be accompanied by two minor changes: we have changed the battle type selection screen and increased the number of levels in the Service Record to 15 by “inserting” a new Level 8. All details will be available immediately before the release of version 0.6.6.
Further development of PvE mode broadly depends on your feedback. Good luck in Operations, Commanders!
Audio
Update 0.6.6 will bring sound improvement all around.
We updated and improved the in-game sound effects like weather during battle and ambient environmental sounds and the sound of a ship’s flooding. We added new and updated the existing sound effects for the movement of all battleships and ambient environmental sounds in ports. We added many music compositions to denote different combat states throughout the interactive in-game music pattern of a battle, for the title track and for the beginning of a battle during countdown.
We’ve introduced a dynamic background music consisting of two layers: as the distance closes between you and an enemy ship, more intense music will play with drums and various sound effects like bass or drum plate beats.
The new ULTRA HIGH audio quality settings are worthy a separate mention. It will be available for download right in the launcher. Version 0.6.6 will bring in intensified gun sounds, vibrant Post Effects for hits, delays to sound effects such as explosions and landing sounds over long distances. This delay is directly related to the distance. The conversion for the most common sound effects will be set for maximum quality.
Mod makers, good news for you! We’ve updated the sound engine WWISE (2016.2.1 build 5995) and all officially released modifications in the .wem format. Like in the case with the sounds of main guns, torpedoes and secondary armament, version 0.6.6 will support voiceover mods in the .mp3 format, too.
Balance Changes
German battleships will no longer be the only ships to use unique HE shells — their tech tree “neighbours”, the German cruisers starting from Tier 4 will now use them as well. In other words, we have increased the HE shells penetration to compensate their relatively small damage output.
But these are not all changes for German cruisers. Nurnberg has become more effective thanks to circular rotation of her rear main caliber guns, as this is where the main fire power of the cruiser is concentrated. At the same time, Tier X Hindenburg is now highly resistant to large-caliber HE shell explosions.
Japanese destroyer Yugumo has always been a litle behind in performance compared to other Tier 9 destroyers. In many ways, this reason was due to her limited choice of torpedoes, which forced players to aggressive play in short distance. Such play style is not necessarily comfortable for everyone, so we decided to broaden the range of options by adding 12km Type93 mod.3 torpedoes most players are familiar with. They will allow higher performance in the battles while using less aggreesive playstyle.
And the last of the most noticeable changes. We have lowered the citadel for battleships Montana, Iowa and Missouri. Her upper border is now almost at the waterline level. This will allow to play these ships more actively and maneuver freely, as hitting their citadel is now a little harder.
Other Improvements
With so many requests from our players, we’ve reworked the torpedo launch functionality. If a ship is destroyed when she is launching torpedoes, all torpedoes will now launch. Just give the order in time!
One more enhancement for the torpedo launcher: torpedo tubes will now be included in the “Switch camera automatically to each main gun” function.
To make your gameplay yet more comfortable, we’ve added one more improvement. When designating the target for AA, if Line of Sight to the aircraft is broken (i.e. the aircraft is temporarily out of detection range) and is then re-established, the focus command does not need to be re-designated again until the aircraft have landed or get destroyed.
We have made changes to the Controls Settings as well. We added an intermediate option for the Alternative battle interface mode. Now, it has three settings: Off, Adaptive and Full. Unlike Full, the Adaptive option will show extended information about the ships in three instances – when capturing a target, at the specific distance from your ship (approximately 6,7 km) and for a group of ships that fall into the viewing range of your binoculars, depending on the zoom.
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